How Tradwife Content Amplifies Far-Right Conspiracy Theories

It’s not all just videos of baking bread and gardening tips

Image licensed from Shutterstock

You’ve likely come across them online already.

‘Tradwives’ and the broader ‘trad’ movement they’re associated with are a relatively new niche Internet subculture that has recently gained a fair bit of mainstream attention.

And that’s not just because of what they advocate for — a return to ‘traditional’ gender norms and ‘biblical womanhood’ — but also because of their peculiar and hard-to-miss aesthetic resembling something straight out of a 1950s cake mix advertisement.

Only their romanticisation of that era and rigid gender roles is largely ahistorical and, unsurprisingly, overlooks the reality faced by many housewives back then.

I’ve previously discussed how the notion that women used to ‘just stay at home’ applied only to a small segment of the population — white, middle and upper class — and only for a brief period, and that even among those women who indeed didn’t have paid employment, happiness was rather elusive. (That’s what Betty Friedan identified as the ‘problem that has no name’ in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.)

Much has also been said, and rightly so, about the potential impact of the tradwife…